


phoenix

by graiai



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, functional immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22666993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graiai/pseuds/graiai
Summary: Lio Fotia both was and was not fourteen years old.
Relationships: Lio Fotia & Promare
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	phoenix

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



When Lio Fotia was fourteen years old, he was furious when all logic said he ought to be terrified, and that fury set alight, engulfing him in flames and burning up everything it could. 

Like all growing teenagers, Lio was ravenous, and with the fire set deep in his bones, the only growth he had left was hotter, hotter, _hotter_. The flames are a baptism from which you are reborn, re _made_ , ascendant to something larger than you yourself could ever have dreamed when all you had was flesh. 

The Promare burn all that away. In fire, Lio Fotia became something _other_ , taking his first steps out of the ashes in a body stitching itself back together, a friend in his ear whispering in a voice like chimes, _thank you thank you thank you_. 

_We’re so proud of you_ , the Promare whispered still five years later, ten, twenty, as the Mad Burnish offered the world salvation by bonfire. 

Lio Fotia both was and was not fourteen years old. A body, once reconsituted, was eternal, and _his_ burned all up in that first, vicious blast that was his freedom: decades on, and he’s not aged since, taken for a child—for someone vulnerable, breakable, malleable—even as he was the most feared man in Promepolis by far, a symbol of everything so-called humanity hated. Funny, how that worked. 

Lio Fotia was fourteen years old and he was two months off from forty-five. _More, more, more_ the flames begged, seeking out the palm of his hand the way a kitten might press up against it in search of attention. _Burn brighter, burn faster, burn hotter_ , and with the whole world wobbling unsteady atop the precipice, how was he meant to deny them? 

When Lio was in middle school, he had read comic books: at fourteen and a little too weird, a little too intense, a little too _pretty_ in a way teenage boys didn’t usually try to bring attention to, he’d been drawn to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, a tongue-in-cheek name for outcasts with no intention of seeking acceptance and a pipe dream to change the world. Thirty years later, Lio was a pipe _bomb_ and he would burn everything up, even himself, to achieve it. Brighter, faster, hotter, _more, more, moremoremore—_

Lio Fotia and the whole rest of the world were remade one final time when he stepped out of the ashes with Galo Thymos at his side. Finally content, finally satiated, he could grow no hotter—but by his forty-fifth birthday, what he _had_ grown, to his shock, was an inch.


End file.
